Ray Blanchette, CEO of Joe’s Crab Shack restaurants shares the secret sauce in Joe’s recipe for excellent food and customer service and his company’s focus on making Joe’s a great place to work.
CE: Okay, Chester Elton for the Carrot Culture podcast this week. I’m in beautiful downtown Houston, Texas, and my great pleasure to welcome to the podcast Ray Blanchette, who is the CEO of Joe’s Crab Shacks. Welcome to the podcast.
RB: Thank you very much. Great to be here.
CE: Yeah, we had so much fun this afternoon. Now, tell us a little bit about Joe’s Crab Shack—I know you’re kind of a new entity, being on your own—and a little of your background and why now you’re starting to focus on what you call this Cultural Revolution.
RB: Well, interesting…you know Joe’s has been around for…I think in 1990 is really when it was sort of started…and we got involved about two years ago. We bought it from Landry’s. For us it just seemed like…Joe’s seemed like a really good idea! The business itself…it’s got a really unique value proposition.
CE: It’s a different kind of experience, Joe’s Crab shack, isn’t it?
RB: It sits out there all by itself. If you’re in a Joe’s Crab Shack, you can’t confuse it with anything else. You know its Joe’s. That, coupled with the fact that the seafood segment is sort of wide open, here Joe’s is with its own personality and it just seemed like the right place for us. Shortly after buying the business, we realized we were off-track a little bit. When you looked at why was Joe’s in distress—because we bought the business in distress—it seemed like they’d sort of lost its focus and it really wasn’t food-centric. It was more based on the experience and I think the only sustainable advantage in restaurants is food. So we—everyone—sort of rallied around. We got a new leadership team, we focused on food, we made our food better and we made our business better. And now as we sit here today with an improved service proposition and improved food proposition, we said, “Where have we really not focused yet and where do we need to focus to get the business to the next level?” From my perspective it really was about…the Culture Revolution is sort of the next strategic building block for the business. Getting people to want to be a part of Joe’s, to want to stay with Joe’s, to want to really understand and embrace the brand, is going to help us move the brand forward. So, it really is more strategic in nature, than philanthropic, right? But, I think you accomplish both at the same time.
CE: Yeah, you know, I always like to laugh about when you focus on your people and treat them right, nice guys really do finish first! And in your business where your brand really is your people, I mean there’s no doubt about it.
RB: No question about it.
CE: You can have the best marketing materials, but if they go into a Crab Shack and have a bad experience they’re just flat out not coming back. So, how do you instill that? I know you’ve got some acronyms you use about perfection and price and so on. How has that helped you get the message to your general managers of your restaurants and to your line people? How do those kinds of things help drive the message through?
RB: Well, price in particular—what price is is really the price of admission into Joe’s. And the PRICE as an acronym sort of represents our values around Passion, Respect, Integrity, Courage, and Energy. And I think it helps in that your strategies may change, your tactics absolutely will change, but your values shouldn’t change. And for us, it gives us the opportunity to get in front of people and communicate the same things over and over again. I think that more than anything has helped us integrate the message in the business. I think, historically, most restaurant companies are really good at implementing things. We’re always changing things. We’re massive implementers, but we’re not terribly good integrators, so by staying on the same message for more than a year, and know for the foreseeable future we’ll continue to drive this same message home, what it does, is it really lays a foundation for us to build off of. And that’s where PRICE kind of comes into play as a key driver for us.
CE: And then you talk about this quest for perfection—the perfect food. And you’re right. Restaurants—you can have a great experience, but if you don’t like the food it doesn’t really matter because people want to eat. So you talk about the ‘perfect food’ and the ‘perfect beverage’ and the ‘perfect customer service experience.’ How are you driving that home, other than putting it on the posters?
RB: Well, it’s part of all the conversations that we have with operators. We would never get in front of a group of operators and not talk about the operation absolutes, which are perfect food and beverage and the others that you mentioned. So, again, for us it’s continuity of messaging, about getting out and being able to talk about those same things. You start to breathe life into it over time and what we find is that the level of conversation increases each time. We know we’re not going to achieve perfection, but you strive for perfection in hopes of achieving excellence, right? And that really is sort of the methodology behind this, that if we aim for the bull’s eye and you miss, you may still hit the target. If you aim for the target and miss, you get nothing.
CE: I love that. Striving for perfection and then getting excellence.
RB: That really is the methodology behind it. The words were carefully chosen. We want these operational absolutes to be aspirational to people. But most importantly, we’re realistic enough to know that if we don’t get out and walk the talk every day, if we don’t lead by example and role model these behaviors, hold ourselves…it’s interesting when you talk to folks that work in the restaurant support center they don’t have the same operational absolutes because they’re not operating restaurants, but you heard the CFO today talk about striving for perfection in the way in which he executes accounts payable, because that’s a common vernacular and it connects with people. We’re setting the bar just as high for folks in the restaurant support center around serving our customer, who’s a general manager, as we ask them to set for their folks.
CE: Common language. Great point. Now, how do you, and how have you seen this, driven home using the recognition strategies and why is that part of the Cultural Revolution, in your view?
RB: For me, it probably…this goes back to my Friday’s days. When I started at TGI Friday’s, it was the first place I’d ever worked. They were fanatical about recognition.
CE: The pins and the whole thing?
RB: Everybody was in suspenders and they wore pins on their collars and they wore pins on their suspenders and getting a “wow” pin when you “wowed” a guest, or an “MVP” pin when you were the star of the shift, I mean it really was meaningful to people. And I remember how meaningful it was. I remember how meaningful it’s been to me through my career. I don’t care what level you get, you achieve in business, it’s always nice to hear that you’re doing a good job or that you’re satisfying the people that you’re tasked with satisfying. I think it probably started at Friday’s for me and I believe in a recognition culture. I think the other thing is…I think it’s the leader’s job to set the tone for how people are going to engage with each other. I just want us to be a nice place to work.
CE: You know it’s funny—you talked about your CFO, Jeff, and he used an expression I loved: “It’s the leader’s job to cast the shadow.” If we’re not doing it, how can we expect other people to do it? Well listen, you’ve been great with your time and I know you’ve got a lot of people to see tonight. A couple of last questions—tell me about one of your favorite recognition experiences, one where you saw the impact and where you became that real believer in recognition. Because I know you are.
RB: You want me to tell you the Russia story.
CE: Well we could. That’s a great story! Not the train story, but the employee story.
RB: Oh yeah, the employee story. It was absolutely Russia. The first restaurant that we opened in Tverskaya for TGI Friday’s in Moscow and when I had the opportunity to give some recognition to one of the stars before a grand opening night and she ran off in tears, hysterical. She wouldn’t come up onstage and receive the recognition. When I went and spoke to her afterwards and she said, “Men aren’t supposed to talk to women that way in Russia.” But what she was really saying was that she was the one that should be thanking me because that job was the best thing that ever happened to her, and really to anyone in her family and now here we are recognizing her. I just, at that point in time knew that at any point in the future recognition has to be a big part of the culture.
CE: That is so awesome.
RB: It was cool.
CE: Excellent! Thanks so much for having us in. You know this is the start of a good relationship. Let’s keep talking and have some fun.
RB: Everyone today was completely blown away. They really were. I heard from every single person that came up to me during the cocktail reception, or dinner, they all just said, “Wow!” Nice job!
CE: Let’s do it again. Thanks for your time. Thanks very much.
RB: You’re welcome.
Chester visits with Susan about their ongoing training efforts to implement a Carrot Culture, from the executive team’s mental shift required to bring in a recognition program, to the certification workshop at Carrot HQ in Salt Lake City to implementation leading to decreased turnover, higher engagement and increased productivity.
CE: Hey this is Chester Elton with your weekly Carrot Culture podcast. I am so delighted to invite to the podcast Susan Baranowski from Jones of New York. She’s the VP of HR and has been with Jones of New York for 10 years. So welcome to the podcast.
SB: Thank you very much.
CE: We were just talking on the phone and you were telling me such great stories I thought, “I’ve got to get this for the podcast.” So if you would just go ahead and talk about your involvement right now in your Carrots Training. Just tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today with the Carrots Training and your recognition strategies.
SB: Certainly because one, I love to talk. And recognition is something that I have always had a passion for and really felt there was a need for in our company as well. So what we’re doing I am very excited about. A few years ago, we decided that we had the need to create some consistency in our service awards program. You spoke then about the importance of creating the experience and recognition and as I just said a few minutes ago, you had me then, Chester.
CE: Excellent.
SB: And we’re a little slow to get started with some things but once we get the momentum going, we really get flying with things. So sometimes things take a little bit longer than I would like to see them but eventually we catch up with things. So here is what happened. We had the service awards program in place and we were using OC Tanner for that and we got a lot of positive enthusiasm about that in creating consistency and getting even, actually some feedback that managers could really take this and run with it and they’d like to find some more ways to provide the recognition. We had an executive meeting. We have one every year. And since we had changed in the helm of leadership last year, we decided to do an experiment with all of our executives. We asked them, “If you were CEO for the day, what three things would you do or change within the company?”
CE: I love that exercise. You be the boss. Tell us what you need.
SB: It was great. We had about two hundred people in the room and we broke them up into teams and everyone had the opportunity to make a presentation about what things that they would change. From the meeting came our philosophy of People, Product, and Execution. Those are the three things that we focus on throughout the company. People was born from an overwhelming majority of teams that presented in that group that they were CEOs for the day the first thing that they would effect is recognition. We want more ways to recognize and thank and appreciate our employees.
CE: Isn’t that amazing?
SB: What a novel concept! Especially in HR, we were all delighted to hear that. And it really told us, “We’re ready for that.” So we were ready to take the next step, which is when we met with OC Tanner and talked about the next step which was the recognition program. I had the opportunity along with some of my coworkers to go out to Utah for the facilitator program. And we came back just jazzed and excited about this.
CE: This was the Train the Trainer?
SP: This was the Train the Trainer.
CE: Excellent.
SP: It’s an amazingly simple idea. But the rewards have been since that have come from it are just unbelievable.
CE: Isn’t that great. We talk about the fact that it’s common sense uncommonly practiced. Would you agree with that?
SP: I would agree with that. I think one of the things you overlook in the day to day is the fact that people—it’s a basic need, that people need to feel appreciated, recognized, and valued for what they do. And it’s scary in this day and age with turnover, with recruiting challenges that we face, with economic issues, the fact that very basic needs that cost absolutely nothing can have major financial impact when people are choosing and making decisions about their career and their employment opportunities based on how they’re treated.
CE: Well right now we are in, no question, these turbulent times, and that you’ve made this ongoing commitment to training. How do you think that’s going to help you as things calm down?
SB: I think it’s going to help tremendously. It has helped us. We’ve actually rolled it out initially in our distribution center locations. And the fact that people are being recognized for the things that they’ve done well. It’s coming very easy to people. They’re very surprised that it takes virtually no time to stop and, using the key things from the Carrot A Day—frequent, timely, specific—how much more they get out of people.
CE: Excellent
SB: When you are asking people to work long hours, work weekends, crunch time, time away from your family. You get a lot more out of somebody and their efforts if they feel like they’re valued for it.
CE: Well tell me a little bit—and that’s tremendous insights, and like you say, common sense and once people start to do it, they are surprised how easy it is with what you’ve got some framework around that. Tell me a little about your T3 experience and what made that so impactful for you?
SB: For me personally?
CE: Yes, and for your team. Going out to Salt Lake City. We keep talking to people about getting away from your organization and come out and really focus. Did that help you?
SB: It did. I don’t want to offend you by saying this, but I almost felt like I was at the Disneyworld of employment.
CE: Good. Well that’s not offensive, that’s great.
SB: First of all, I’d never been to Utah. The experience was wonderful. I think it is very important when you’re doing any type of training that you need to step away from the day to day because you can’t focus completely unless you’re submerged in the experience and you are able to leave the office, the Blackberry. Leave all that behind and do what you need to do. It makes it so much easier if it is something that you feel very strongly about and in case I haven’t conveyed that, I do.
CE: And I always love it when I’m in Salt Lake City when they are giving the T3 because the food is exceptional, isn’t it?
SB: Oh, my goodness! I never ate so well. We, of course, were all just in heaven, I think, with the cafeteria. One of the things I thought was amazing was walking through the cafeteria and seeing your top executives sitting there at a table, having a meeting, eating ice cream.
CE: There you go.
SB: They did not have any hesitation stopping their meeting to talk to us and welcome us and everyone made us feel comfortable, especially the environment was wonderful, the location was beautiful. That aside, the content and the fact that people like Adrian took time to spend time with us to talk to us about this program was… I felt very honored.
CE: Well great, because our whole team worked very hard to make that experience everything you just said so they’ll be delighted to hear it went so well.
SB: It really was. You definitely…everyone feels very strongly about this and I think it reinforced our commitment when we went back to our various workplaces. We’re supported in this by everyone in your organization in making sure that this succeeds as well.
CE: Great. Well, now let’s get a move on to your implementation of your recognition strategy. Clearly you saw training as a key in getting your managers engaged. And now you’re continuing to order and you’re continuing to train. Why is that so important to your strategy?
SB: It’s important. One of the things in the strategy is, I don’t want this to be training. I don’t want people to feel like any other training they have to do. “Oh, I have to go to harassment prevention training. I have to go to training on how to write a form.” I don’t want this to be considered training. I want this to be considered just an…an experience, for lack of a better word off the top of my head. That way this becomes a part of my company culture. Not just another training program that we have to go to—“Oh, great, we’re going to learn how to say thank you.”
CE: And so what is your plan for sustainability to keep that going throughout Jones New York?
SB: We’re just really on the ground floor of getting this started. We have quite a few different divisions throughout the organization that we’re going to be rolling this out in, anywhere from the distribution side to retail management employees and everybody in between. Once we get that started we’ve reinforced in our executive meeting this year—we talked about training. We did present everyone was with The 24-Carrot Manager…
CE: Excellent.
SB: book. Even from that people had a taste for what was to come with the Thanks™ training and got the book. We’re so excited. We can’t wait for this. When are you coming do this? I think creating that excitement and then initially getting the training going, we kept the door open for endless possibilities for where you go from there.
CE: Now in your business in the retail business, your people being engaged really is your brand and your business isn’t it?
SB: Absolutely. I think that in everything that you do. I think that correlates to any
business that anyone does.
CE: That’s one of my questions for you. So if you were talking to a company that was considering training and whatnot, how would you position it to them from your experience so far?
SB: The value that you gain from this, I don’t think that you could put a price to it.
CE: So are you saying we should charge more?
SB: Noooo. Do you want to really have that conversation with me now?
CE: No, no, I’m just kidding. But, I love that when it gets to the point, where you say, “Look, it was worth the investment.”
SB: It certainly is. Honestly, anything that you do, that you said, “Is this going to be done well?” There is an investment involved in that. You have to make that initial investment, but I think the value in it, is people…you’re not necessarily going to see that initially in a dollar return on investment. You will because people are engaged, people feel valued. They stay. They’re not leaving us to get the things that we’re not giving them. Because we’re there. And again we’ve been using it as part of our culture that People, Product, and Execution. The first and most important thing within our business is the people and if you aren’t recognizing the people, then where are you going?
CE: Well listen, we’re very proud to be associated with your organization. We always say we love working with people that really get it, and clearly you really get it.
CE: Lastly, we always love the heroic stories. Can you give an example of one of your managers as someone who really has embraced this idea the power of carrot and the Carrot Culture that you’ve seen that you might be able to share with us?
SB: Well heroism, I think, comes in small packages. I have, actually, a manager who works for me down in my Virginia distribution center who did attend the training in Utah and immediately went back and presented it to our managers. It’s a very simple story. Every day, because people get so busy, she will go out and give them the daily dose of Carrot Culture for the day and challenge each one of them to use it. And being on the receiving end of that from one of my employees, I can’t describe to you how that made me feel. It was the coolest experience for me yesterday.
CE: That’s awesome.
SB: Once we get the training going, I’m sure I’ll have more.
CE: Here’s the thing that I love that you said, “It’s the little things that people do every day that makes such a big difference.” And I think you nailed it.
SB: We’re also… people work long hours in the areas I’m responsible for and I kind of feel like we’re always feeding them. “Oh, you’re working? Here we’re going to have donuts today.” “You’re working, we’re going to have sandwiches today.” You can only give people so much food.
CE: Well listen, this has been delightful to spend some time with you. And you know as we finish the podcast I want to wrap up a couple of the things. Thanks so much for sharing your enthusiasm with us and your commitment. It invigorates us to know that there are champions out there just like you so thanks so much for your time. And hey, we’ll do this again in a year and see where you are.
SB: My pleasure. Look forward to it.
CE: Okay, bye-bye.